JoshL7

[jblewis]

You are more than welcome to LP this set as well. Don’t let me discourage you.

[chipster1059]

26: There are some really fun tank puzzles here. The starting sokoban, and the final room, are my favourites.

28: It's a decent level; I especially like the tank room.

29: A clever puzzle, surprisingly hard.

36: It took me a while to figure out that I didn't need to hold down the trap buttons It's a fun sokoban.

37: This level was surprisingly hard, but it was fun; I especially like the tank room.

38:

39: Decent blue wall maze.

40: There are some clever puzzles here. It's a decent itemswapper.

41: I love the blobs on fire and the recessed walls. Really nice level.

42: This was a decent maze, and quite hard I think.

43: The blank hint tiles slightly annoys me. However, I really liked this level, and I agree with Miika that it is your best Walls of CCLP4 contest entry.

45: Really fun key level

46: Really good-looking maze concept; surprisingly hard.

47: My favourite rooms are the toggle/block room (nice use of ice under a block) and the pink ball room.

48: There are some really fun puzzles here.

49: This is an awesome compressed level, and I like the pointless chips and socket, as well as those sevens only visible in the editor and the 77 time limit.

50: I have already seen several levels using this concept, but this is one of my favourites.

51: Yeah...the title IS disturbing...it's a fun ice maze though.

52: Really fun puzzles. This is the type of level, however, that would work better in CC2 with bonus flags.

53: At first I misread the title as "Paranoia Ranch". I'll probably use that title. Anyway, this was a fun level, and it had some nice puzzles. However, it is not necessary to press the tank button; is this a bust?

54: Nice level with a strict time limit; I especially like the teeth, walker and partial post sections.

55: A really fun level.

56: One of my favourite levels so far in the set. Very creative use of teeths.

57: Better than Unmitigated Hint Factory Disaster.

59: There are some fun puzzles here, but I'm not a fan of the glider/fireball room at the end, it's easy to cook and at the very end.

60: A really creative puzzle. One of the best levels in the set. However, I managed to solve the level without using the recessed wall at (14,28).

62: This was a nice twist on the original concept, and I like how some blocks need to be pushed into water.

64: Decent pink ball level. I'm not really a fan of the skate trick at the end though.

65: Really clever awesome trick to solve.

67: A really amazing level, the title is very appropriate, and the ending block puzzles are very clever.

I haven't solved the other levels yet, but I will leave feedback on them once I have

[Flareon350]

11 hours ago, chipster1059 said:

53: At first I misread the title as "Paranoia Ranch". I'll probably use that title. Anyway, this was a fun level, and it had some nice puzzles. However, it is not necessary to press the tank button; is this a bust?

The pink ball used to be a tank but somehow I forgot to make it a tank again not a bust, just another oversight. I've updated the set to fix this. Thanks for pointing it out!

[FJepsen]

Based on the first 20 levels, this is one of the sets I have enjoyed playing the most in a very long time. The stand-out level for me so far is 'Drops of Jupiter', a very well crafted level.

Overall the Yowser/Bummer ratio is just right, for me anyway.

[chipster1059]

44: The sokoban that has to be done twice is my favourite part of the level. However, I'm not a fan of the use of traps in the top part of the level, especially since, unlike for the fireball room, the hint doesn't explain their wiring.

53: The bust appears fixed now

58: I found the suction boot room to be rather frustrating, but the rest of the level was very creative, nice uses of thieves.

61: Really fun puzzles, especially the recessed wall section and everything after the trap. Those pink balls on invisible walls are awesome.

63: Awesome level. All rooms are great in their own way.

66: It is an interesting use of locks, and some of the puzzles are really fun. I especially liked what came after the sockets.

68: Really hard level, but very fun and rewarding. The puzzles are really clever, and I like how one needs to venture outside the box to solve it.

69: Really hard level, but also very fun.

70: It's a very fun level. It's been a while since I played any of the other Flareon levels, so I can't really compare it

Overall, I had a lot of fun playing this set; it is awesome

Flareon1 when?

[Flareon350]

8 hours ago, chipster1059 said:

44: The sokoban that has to be done twice is my favourite part of the level. However, I'm not a fan of the use of traps in the top part of the level, especially since, unlike for the fireball room, the hint doesn't explain their wiring.

At the time I designed that part of the level, I didn't think of it as unfair but now I can easily see the misdirection there. And being so late in the level feels like a cheap shot as a designer. It would have been mentioned in a hint but I couldn't do that with the starting fireball room.

So! I went ahead and made an update to the set that makes that section of the level a lot more fair and clear to understand. I should have went with this initially but please update your copies! A resolve is required unfortunately but that shouldn't be an issue considering it's been well-received so far

[ajmiam]

More of my experiences playing through the set. Note: There may be spoilers to the solutions of these levels in my comments, so don't look if you haven't solved yet! (Covers levels 11-17)

[Click to Show Content]

Level 11 (Prison Hall): For something so short it sure drove me mad, since no matter what I tried it always took 3 blocks to get the chips, and then one would get stuck against the left wall! Then I figured out the trick...I didn't need to blow up ALL the bombs right away...well played, Josh! Good puzzle.

Level 12 (Blue Key Chamber): Another small level that took me several tries to beat. The difficulty is definitely ramping up! Though I probably could have been a bit more observant. The 200 second time limit kind of made me nervous, I think...it may be a relatively small level, but there's a lot to do, and the more stuff is crammed into a section, the more closely and carefully I have to look at it. (Thinking of the top-left.) Still, a fun level and I was pleasantly surprised to see the key behind the bomb at the start get used for something after all.

Level 13 (Fire Glide Caves): The locks-and-recessed-wall paths were nice. I liked how you could choose whether to use monsters or blocks for some of the buttons (like in the bottom-right room), but unfortunately the two glider rooms were practically identical (both involved sacrificing one block in water, then using the other to direct the gliders from the outside straight through the center). The ending got me because I totally forgot to pick up the last chip before heading through the force floor the first time...my bad! This was definitely easier than the previous two levels.

Level 14 (Green Fever): Pretty standard maze, but the extra chips and losing the boots at the end (even if it was still really easy to get to the bottom-right corner and the exit) helped it to stand out just a bit.

Level 15 (There Goes the Neighborhood): There were several tricky cooks to avoid when you couldn't see everything remaining in the level (but could kind of guess at it), such as: not filling in the water with the block at the start, not cramming the ball all the way against the tank, and not being able to clone more than one glider. The third one was heavily implied, though, by the blocks next to the clone button, and the others were early in the level (which is overall short) so not a big problem. It's a little strange, though, how the set seems to go between extremely straightforward levels like the previous two and levels where trying even the slightest obvious-looking thing could be a cook. I definitely liked how you clear paths to get around the recessed walls you used up earlier and travel between the upper and lower parts of the level.

Level 16 (The Whoa Zone): Mazes with tons of teleports have been done before, but never quite the same way as this.

"Albeit, there's no way to make this concept uncookable..." Josh says. However, as a player, one thing you can do, I realized, is avoid teleporting right, lest this happen:

[img]<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_2018_03/image.png.e6ffef8112655bf1d3bf7795dffc528b.png[/img]

Thankfully, I got it on the second try. There are plenty of ways to approach the chips, and the high density of recessed walls compared to teleports meant it wasn't too hard to get to any of them. (Looking for ways to teleport up or down to a chip definitely helps.) I think the level size was chosen well.

Level 17 (Slytherin Common Room): Hmm...I know Slytherin students sleep in a dungeon, but I hope it's not this gross! Anyway, the blob-filling chip-collecting room at the start was pretty neat, kind of what I hoped to achieve with my level "The Green Virus" but on a smaller scale so the pressure felt more immediate. The rest was OK, thankfully not too hard. I did have the misfortune of having to wait a long time for the final blob to drain from the flipper hallway right before the end. I did go back to get the secret hint, which took a fair amount of patience and courage...most of the time, there were 3-4 blobs in that upper-left corner of the starting room, so I had to wait for it to go down to 1 blob and then make a beeline to the red key. Luckily I was able to escape using the force floors. I did manage to get it without dying even once.

[Flareon350]

Set updated once again! This update fixes a couple busts in Indigo Plateau that were found by Jeffrey I had a feeling there were ways to bust it that I didn't catch, so much appreciated for informing me

[ajmiam]

A few more comments from the levels I just played...

Level 18 (Cold Hard Chip): I liked the aesthetic of the hallways with ice tiles down the middle/a few branching off. The yellow key section was just intuitive enough for me to get it on the first try by process-of-elimination even though not everything was visible at the start, which felt good. Unfortunately I didn't realize that you absolutely have to enter the ice checkerboard section from the bottom-right, resulting in a surprise ambush by hidden walls:

[img]<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_2018_04/5ad190b4dca40_coldhardchipcook.JPG.8313cf12919b5ae8350d28c69ff10b64.JPG[/img]

Level 19 (Drops of Jupiter): This started off nice and relaxing with some simple sokobans with small twists, and then suddenly some harrowing monster dodging near the end...a bit nerve-wracking, but I got through it in one piece. My favorite sokobans were the ones that involved the teleports.

Level 20 (Fortune Ravine): Like the previous level, another nice themed campaign level, but here the theme was recessed walls. I think the difficulty was just right here for its place in the set and it very gradually sloped downwards (unlike the previous level which seemed to spike upwards around halfway through). There were a few places I wish I could have seen farther, but also could have probably avoided cooks if I'd been more careful. (The red/yellow/green key section looked like guesswork at first, but then I realized I could tell that the red key had to come before the yellow.) My favorite part was going through a bomb/recessed wall maze and then clearing out the bombs using a fireball cloner!

---

And now because it was getting late and I decided to skip around arbitrarily:

Level 49 (Seven by Seven): One cool thing about this level was being able to see the whole thing, notice that there is no visible exit--and yet still I knew exactly where the exit had to be. (And I was right.) It turned out much simpler than I expected; I never had to use the trapped ball or the flippers for anything. Was that intended? Anyway, the nice thing about leaving the flippers untouched is that you avoid the "dumb Lynx ending" you mentioned in your designer comment (the tank doesn't need to be stopped on the button if the flippers are still there).

[Flareon350]

On 4/13/2018 at 10:29 PM, ajmiam said:

A few more comments from the levels I just played...

Level 18 (Cold Hard Chip): I liked the aesthetic of the hallways with ice tiles down the middle/a few branching off. The yellow key section was just intuitive enough for me to get it on the first try by process-of-elimination even though not everything was visible at the start, which felt good. Unfortunately I didn't realize that you absolutely have to enter the ice checkerboard section from the bottom-right, resulting in a surprise ambush by hidden walls:

<a data-fileid="43" href="<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_2018_04/5ad190b4dca40_coldhardchipcook.JPG.8313cf12919b5ae8350d28c69ff10b64.JPG" title="Enlarge image">[img]<fileStore.core_Attachment>/monthly_2018_04/5ad190b4dca40_coldhardchipcook.JPG.8313cf12919b5ae8350d28c69ff10b64.JPG[/img]</a>

This was actually pointed out to me upon releasing the set but I didn't feel the need to change it because no one else seemed to go through that direction (at least no one really complained about it). Still don't to be honest because the level is open-ended enough elsewhere and well... not every single level needs to be solved the first try I realize it's technically unfair though so I apologize.

On 4/13/2018 at 10:29 PM, ajmiam said:

Level 20 (Fortune Ravine): Like the previous level, another nice themed campaign level, but here the theme was recessed walls. I think the difficulty was just right here for its place in the set and it very gradually sloped downwards (unlike the previous level which seemed to spike upwards around halfway through). There were a few places I wish I could have seen farther, but also could have probably avoided cooks if I'd been more careful. (The red/yellow/green key section looked like guesswork at first, but then I realized I could tell that the red key had to come before the yellow.) My favorite part was going through a bomb/recessed wall maze and then clearing out the bombs using a fireball cloner!

That bomb/recessed wall part is also my favorite part of the level. Glad you enjoyed it overall! Definitely one of my top favorites in the set.

On 4/13/2018 at 10:29 PM, ajmiam said:

Level 49 (Seven by Seven): One cool thing about this level was being able to see the whole thing, notice that there is no visible exit--and yet still I knew exactly where the exit had to be. (And I was right.) It turned out much simpler than I expected; I never had to use the trapped ball or the flippers for anything. Was that intended? Anyway, the nice thing about leaving the flippers untouched is that you avoid the "dumb Lynx ending" you mentioned in your designer comment (the tank doesn't need to be stopped on the button if the flippers are still there).

Yes everything you see there was intended in some shape or form. I did want it all to be part of the solution upon first designing it but as soon as I realized it wasn't necessary, I liked it so I kept it all in to kind of throw off the player. It worked in J.B.'s LP

While we're mentioning this level I might as well throw it out there that the 64 second solution (Hi Jeffrey) is pretty awesome.